Category Archives: speaking

Last year my girl­friend and I watched the pilot epis­ode of a new TV show and were imme­di­ately hooked. The pilot epis­ode was refresh­ingly com­plex and forced us to guess miss­ing plot details con­tinu­ously: it’s adven­tur­ous to make your audi­ence work so hard dur­ing a pilot, we sur­mised.

We later dis­covered that, due to a tech­nic­al glitch, we actu­ally missed the first fif­teen minutes of the show (about 30%). The ‘com­plete’ ver­sion of the epis­ode was less sat­is­fy­ing.

Bezos is so god­damned smart that you have to turn it into a game for him or he’ll be bored and annoyed with you. That was my first real­iz­a­tion about him. [â€¦]

So you have to start tear­ing out whole para­graphs, or even pages, to make it inter­est­ing for him. He will fill in the gaps him­self without miss­ing a beat. And his brain will have less time to get annoyed with the slow pace ofÂ yourÂ brain.

Using We-ness lan­guage implies a shared iden­ti­fic­a­tion between spouses, even when the con­ver­sa­tion is focused on an area of con­flict. Con­sist­ent with this, We-ness was asso­ci­ated with more pos­it­ive and less neg­at­ive emo­tion beha­vi­ors and with lower car­di­ovas­cu­lar arous­al. In con­trast, Sep­ar­ate­ness lan­guage implies a great­er sense of inde­pend­ence and dis­tance in the rela­tion­ship. Com­pared with We-ness, Sep­ar­ate­ness was asso­ci­ated with a very dif­fer­ent set of mar­it­al qual­it­ies includ­ing more neg­at­ive emo­tion­al beha­vi­or and great­er mar­it­al dis­sat­is­fac­tion.

Laura Ritten­house, an unusu­al type of fin­an­cial ana­lyst, counts the num­ber of times the word “I” occurs in annu­al let­ters to share­hold­ers from cor­por­ate CEOs, con­tend­ing that this and oth­er evid­ence in the let­ters helps pre­dict com­pany per­form­ance (basic find­ing: Ego­ma­ni­acs are bad news).

Wish. Try. Should. Deserve. These are four words thatÂ “lend them­selves to a cer­tain self-decep­tion”, says Dav­id Cain of Raptitude, and when you catch your­self using them you should take note, fig­ure out how the word is being used, and maybe try to change your per­spect­ive.

Not only is it use­less for chan­ging the cir­cum­stances, but it rein­forces the myth to which Iâ€™ve moment­ar­ily fallen prey: that my hap­pi­ness is depend­ent on my cir­cum­stances only and has noth­ing to do with my atti­tude. Itâ€™s a bit­ter little plea that life isnâ€™t what I want it to be in this par­tic­u­lar moment, and a dead giveaway that Iâ€™m not pre­pared to do any­thing about it right now.

Wish­ing is a des­per­ate, self-defens­ive beha­vi­or. It gives you a little hit of relief from a real­ity you donâ€™t want to deal with, but it sure doesnâ€™t move things along.

Of course, in those moments, Iâ€™m too con­sumed by my fantas­ies to see that my atti­tude is usu­ally the biggest and most damning fea­ture of the present cir­cum­stances. If my atti­tude sucks, the cir­cum­stances suck. But acknow­ledging that would mean I have to be respons­ible for it, and itâ€™s easi­er to instead wish for theÂ cav­alryÂ to appear on the hori­zon and save me.

There are obvi­ously prob­lems with this line of reas­on­ing (and Cain dis­cusses some of these in the post com­ments), but I like this gen­er­al idea and feel that we could all add a word or two to this list.

Any delay between the end of a speech and the audi­ence’s applause can send strong neg­at­ive sig­nals to those watch­ing and listen­ing. In order to pre­vent this awk­ward­ness, there are rhet­or­ic­al tricks we can imple­ment that trig­ger applause or laughter at appro­pri­ate moments.

The point about delayed applause is that, when the script and deliv­ery are work­ing well togeth­er, it should hap­pen with­in a split second of the speak­er fin­ish­ing a sen­tence.

That’s why con­trasts and three-part lists are so effect­ive, because they pro­ject a clear com­ple­tion point where every­one knows in advance where the fin­ish line is and that it’s now their turn to respond […]

Bet­ter still is to get the audi­ence to start applaud­ing early, because it gives the impres­sion that they’re so enthu­si­ast­ic and eager to show their agree­ment that they can­’t wait – and the speak­er ends up hav­ing to com­pete to make him­self heard above the rising tide of pop­u­lar acclaim.

One way to do that is to use a three part list, in which the third item is longer than the first two.

I’ve been pre­oc­cu­pied lately with the devel­op­ing after­math of theÂ TÅhoku earth­quake. Unlike oth­er dis­asters on a sim­il­ar or great­er scale, I’m find­ing it easi­er to grasp the real human cost of the dis­aster in Japan as my broth­er lives in Kanagawa Pre­fec­ture and there­fore there are less levels of abstrac­tion between me and those dir­ectly affected. You could say that this feel­ing is related to what Moth­er Teresa was refer­ring to when she she saidÂ “If I look at the mass I will nev­er act. If I look at the one, I will”.

If I had no dir­ect con­nec­tion with Japan I assume the dry stat­ist­ics of the size­able tragedy would leave me mostly unaf­fected – this is what Robert Jay Lifton ter­medÂ “psych­ic numbing”.Â AsÂ Bri­an Zikmund-Fish­er, a risk com­mu­nic­a­tion expert at the Uni­ver­sity of Michigan, intro­duces the top­ic:

People are remark­ably insens­it­ive [to] vari­ations in stat­ist­ic­al mag­nitude. Single vic­tims or small groups who are unique and iden­ti­fi­able evoke strong reac­tions. (Think, for example, the Chilean miners or “baby Jes­sica” who was trapped in the well in Texas in 1987.) Stat­ist­ic­al vic­tims, even if much more numer­ous, do not evoke pro­por­tion­ately great­er con­cern. In fact, under some cir­cum­stances, they may evokeÂ less con­cern than a single vic­tim does. [â€¦]

To over­come psych­ic numb­ing and really attach mean­ing to the stat­ist­ics we are hear­ing [â€¦] we have to be able to frame the situ­ation in human terms.

Zikmund-Fish­er links heav­ily to Paul Slov­ic’s essay on psych­ic numb­ing in terms of gen­o­cide and mass murder (pdf): an essen­tial read for those inter­ested inÂ risk com­mu­nic­a­tion that looks at the psy­cho­logy behind why we are so often inact­ive in the face of mass deaths (part of the answer: our capa­city to exper­i­ence affect and exper­i­en­tial think­ing over ana­lyt­ic­al think­ing).